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The Anarchivic Imperative of Peter Mather's the Wort Papers

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The Anarchivic Imperative of Peter Mather's the Wort Papers Archive Madness: The Anarchivic imperative of Peter Mather’s The Wort Papers RON BLABER Curtin University At work Thomas (Wort) was known to his associates as a determined implementor of innovations. His colleagues new him as an implement of progress and wished to share in the future he envisaged, some from fear, others for want of alternatives. (2) Ah, the worts . St John’s Wort is indigenous to Asia and Europe. In Australia it is probably a garden escape (20) (I should have paid more heed to natural history. I would then be finding my present situation quite interesting and watch the fauna and spend less time scribbling). The people I mixed with in those days knew fascinating things about flowers and animals, earth and sky. Some were fascinated and sought to know more, and were sparing with axe, gun and plough; the others did what people have always done. (117) For those unfamiliar with Peter Mathers, he was born in England in 1931 and passed away in Melbourne in November 2004. He began his literary career as an author but later became a playwright. He attended Sydney Technical College, where he studied agriculture. His first writing appeared in the early 1960s. His first novel Trap (1966), won the Miles Franklin Prize, in somewhat controversial circumstances, Patrick White having withdrawn his nomination. Nevertheless, the novel heralded a new literary force in Australian literature. His second novel, The Wort Papers (1972), ranged across the country in rural settings from the Kimberley to dairy country in northern New South Wales, and further established his reputation as a stylistic innovator and satirist. A collection of short stories, A Change for the Better (1984), was described as ‘ribald, intense, iconoclastic, cheeky, dramatic and a lot of fun.’ Mathers wrote radio plays, articles and published many stories in magazines, journals and newspapers. His work has been championed by Peter Pierce, amongst others. His papers are held by the State Library of Victoria. This paper seeks to create a dialogue between Mather’s The Wort Papers and Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995/1996). The epigraphs point to several concerns that operate within Peter Mather’s The Wort Papers. The novel interrogates the interrelationship between innovation, improvement, tradition and escape. The interrelationship is metonymic of the ways in which Australia is constructed – a place viewed as one of opportunity and growth; a place anxious about its lack of and an insistence on tradition; and a place that offers a potential of getting lost, or removing oneself from the world. Innovation, improvement, tradition and escape are also key elements in the making of the archive. The Wort Papers captures the problematic dynamic between the archival, that which is subject to the rules, processes and laws of the archive, and the anarchival, that which The Anarchivic Imperative of Peter Mather’s The Wort Papers resists and subverts the archive. In the final analysis the novel comes down on the side of the anarchival and its disorderly productivity. In his 2007 publication, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium, Robert Friedel presents a wide ranging account of modernity’s scientific and technological revolution, providing an account of how, from about 1000ME to the present, that revolution is driven by a largely unquestioning belief in the utopian promise of progress. Friedel asserts that ‘by the culture of improvement I mean the ascendancy of values and beliefs permeating all levels of society that “things could be done better”’ (2). Nevertheless, improvement is, as Friedel points out, contingent in so far as there are no absolute measures of what constitutes improvement. Thus, Friedel is careful to show that at moments within this revolution questioning and critique do arise, never more so than in the last half of the 20th Century. Not too far away from the critique of the culture of improvement there remains the idea that ‘things could be done better’ or at least differently. Friedel is convincingly outlines the historical change in the nature of technology that comes to vindicate the observation that technological development, as it moves from singular and individual efforts to more collective and institutional production, becomes less marked by the ephemeral and more underscored by a material sustainability. To a degree, and as the epigraphs from The Wort Papers suggest, Peter Mather’s the novel both critiques the belief in “improvement” and also questions the relationship between the ephemeral and the sustainable. To return to Friedel for a moment. Curiously but importantly, Friedel is careful to acknowledge in the preface that: We historians . are ultimately dependent on those in the past that have left us evidence of their thoughts, words, and deeds. We also depend on those who intervene between ourselves and our sources – the collectors, the record-keepers, clerks, bureaucrats, archivists, and librarians – gatherers and preservers of the evidence of what has gone on before us. (vii) The acknowledgement is curious because thereafter there is no chapter or direct reference to the library as a key to his assessment of the culture of improvement to which his critique contributes and extends. It can be argued that Friedel’s acknowledgement points to a synchronous occlusion of and dependence on the archive, which can be seen as symptomatic not only of a certain madness but also of a problematic very much related to the archive and one of its many its functions, that is as a technology of improvement. This occlusion then provides a productive space in which to insert a playful interrelationship between Peter Mather’s The Wort Papers and Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. In relation to the idea of improvement, how are we to read the record, the archive, the library? Clearly for Friedel the archive is the repository from which improvement (or otherwise) can be discerned and following Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, we are aware, of the double constitution of the archive in that it exhibits both ontological and nomological aspects: (in) the word “archive” – and with the archive of so familiar a word. Arkhe, we recall, the names at once the commencment and the commandment. This name apparently co- ordinates two principle in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence – . ontological principle – but also the principle according to the 2 JASAL Special Issue: Archive Madness law, there where men and gods (sic) command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given – nomological principle. (1) Governed by principles of being and law the archive is a repository for the future, a reference point against which improvement can be measured. In one sense it is always bound to the future and an orderly unfolding of the family history or the history of the household, and by inference society as well. In the case of Mather’s The Wort Papers, we encounter the unfolding of the family history of the Wort family, we read of their experience at the Kimberely Station, Orebul Downs, and their later experience at Uppersass, but whether it is orderly is another question, particularly as they are associated with “garden escapees,” creating an unpredictability that makes difficult the assessment of the future. The trouble with the future of course is that while it is felt to promise the new the improved and the ideal, it also houses endings, conclusions, death and perhaps the need for escape. In his consideration of the fact of Freud’s house becoming museum, not surprisingly for Derrida the death drive, the aggressive, destructive drive is powerfully operative in the archive, which, without leaving any trace, functions as an “anarchivic” force. The death drive ‘will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation.’ And perhaps in the case of The Wort Papers, remembering that it presents as a family record the anarchivic exhibits a seditious and anarchic influence. Against the influence of the anarchivic and to ensure some sense of the future, one of the archive’s function is the delivery of “truth” through the production of “pure” objects, or at least this is the ideal purpose and trajectory of the archivist and the archive, that is to set a standard. However, one of the processes that undermine this objective ideal is that of categorisation. It is at this point an object may acquiesce to or may resist archiving. The object itself may be indeterminate. Peter Mather’s The Wort Papers is a case in point, but if I reflect briefly on my own situation and the context of the time of the novel’s publication in 1972 then the possibility of the archive is thrown into question. At the time of publication, I would have been in my final year at Salisbury East High School facing the draft ballot the following year; but 1972 was also the year a Labor Government was elected, and with the whirlwind entry of Whitlam and Barnard into government marked by extraordinary legislative and regulatory changes the archive and the future became unsettled. However a settling influence would have been the release of 1942 Cabinet papers allowing the recollection of another Labor Government led by the iconic war time, Labor leader John Curtin who is credited with transforming Australia through his pursuit of the American Alliance, which by 1972 was under pressure because of the Vietnam War. Heady times. In a sense no-one knew what to expect. And with the publication of the Wort Papers the OzLit reading public didn’t quite know what we were getting. This was probably also the case for the publishers, for whom the manuscript appears to be everything and its opposites.
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